'Wonder' woman Ann Patchett talks about her new novel

by Kerry Lengel - Jul. 3, 2011 12:00 AMThe Arizona Republic

As far as Ann Patchett is concerned, that famous advice to aspiring authors - "Write what you know" - goes only so far.

Patchett, the favorite literary daughter of Nashville, is ardently in love with her hometown, but her novels have taken her far from her Southern roots. Her prizewinning breakthrough, 2001's "Bel Canto," was a fictional retelling of the Peruvian hostage standoff known as the Lima Crisis. Her 2007 follow-up, "Run," was about an Irish-Catholic politician in Boston.

In her latest novel, "State of Wonder," Patchett journeys deep into the Amazon to explore medical ethics and the emotionally lopsided relationship between a teacher and a student.

"I like to go far afield, and I think it's probably in some ways because I'm such a homebody," she says. "I really like being at home, and so I like to imagine other places, other worlds."

Patchett's protagonist in "State of Wonder" is Dr. Marina Singh, whose original career path as an obstetrician was cut short when she botched a Caesarean as an intern. Now working for a pharmaceutical company in Minneapolis, she is sent to the Amazon to track down a researcher who has gone "off the grid" while developing a potentially lucrative fertility drug.

The catch: The AWOL scientist, Dr. Anneck Swenson, was Marina's mentor in medical school, a giant in the field who hasn't exchanged a word with her former student since that fateful surgical error.

The relationship between a once-godlike teacher and a former student was the seed of the book - or, rather, one of several. Patchett compares the building blocks of a novel to a deck of cards that she shuffles through, looking for dramatically rich combinations.

"One idea is not enough, and you need to have a whole lot of threads running through - I do, just to keep my own self interested," she says. "But I think about the deck of cards a lot, insofar as I feel like basically I've got 52 cards in my hand, and I can shuffle them, I can rearrange them, but in the course of my life, I'm probably never going to have more than 52 cards. So in some ways my novels are very, very different, but there are certain themes that come up over and over again."

A poker hand may be an unusual way to describe a novel, but Patchett's playing-card metaphor yields insights into her writing process - as well as some sage advice to writers hoping to follow her footsteps up the best-seller list.

First card: Main characters

Question: How do you create characters? Do you write out detailed dossiers, the way many how-to books on writing recommend?

Answer: I live with characters in my head. I don't write down lists of traits, I don't write down anything. But I think about it for a long, long time. You think about what people like to eat and the music they like to listen to.

The trick is to think about a whole lot of things you'll never use and to approach it as getting to know someone, in the same way that you meet somebody at a party and think, "Well, we could be really good friends, let's go to the movies, let's go out to lunch, do you have any siblings, where did you grow up?"

You ask them questions. If you forget, you ask them again. You do things together, you develop over time an understanding of one another, and that's how I get to know the people in my head. It's like having an imaginary friend.

Q: Anneck Swenson is vividly drawn.

A: Dr. Swenson was really the most fun of any character I've ever written. I've been listening to my husband's stories about medical school and residency and internship for 17 years. The whole medical-school experience seems like an organized fraternity hazing. It's so inhumane. Just the energy of those stories - "Why is it right? Because I say it's right." Also, my father is a police officer, and I think there's a very similar ethos there. It was not hard for me to tap into the character of Anneck Swenson.

Q: And Marina Singh? Where is she coming from?

A: I just wanted to take a very stable, unadventurous, decent soul and throw her off a cliff, take everything from her. It's just loss after loss after loss, and through every loss, she gets a little stronger and a little more defined, a little more clear-eyed. It's definitely fun to write about somebody who is changing and evolving, and that's one of the great reasons to put everybody in the Amazon, because it allows their character to be tested so severely.

Second card: Amazon adventure

Q: You rely on your imagination, but you don't stint on the research. What did you glean from your trip to South America?

A: There's a way in which I think if I had gone to the Amazon for two hours it probably would have been enough. You know, I just wanted to see it. I just wanted to see leaves the size of dinner plates and these giant bugs everywhere and pink dolphins popping out of the river. It's kind of a lifetime's worth of information almost instantly.

My husband and I were down there for 10 days, and for the first three days I thought it was the most beautiful, exotic, spectacular place I had ever been in my life, and by the eighth day I would have chewed my own arm out of a trap to get out of there. It just drove me nuts. It's overwhelming, and it's so oppressive and claustrophobic. It squashes you. The leaves, the bugs, the things that want to eat you and kill you. The overwhelming glut of life, pulsing life.

If I had only gone for three days, I think I would have written an entirely different novel. I would have written a book about going to paradise or something. And I'm really glad that I stayed long enough to feel oppressed by it.

Q: What other details made it into the book?

A: All these strange things happened. For example, they take you out on these river excursions that go on six, eight hours, where you're going up and down tiny tributaries and you don't see any human life. We were in an open boat, 12 or 15 feet long, and at one point one of the guests said to the guide, "Stop the boat a second. Wait, wait, bring it back a little, bring it to the left a little." And this guy reached into the river and pulled an anaconda into the boat.

It turns out this is a guy named Greg Greer from Atlanta, and he was a naturalist, and this is what he did. He went all over the world hauling snakes into boats (laughs). But, hey, we didn't know that at the time, and it was very dramatic. He kept the snake in the boat for about 20 minutes and gave us a little lecture while the snake was trying desperately to eat his head. And it stunk. You know, there are moments that you think, "Wow, if this hadn't happened, I would never have known that an angry anaconda puts out a scent that surpasses anything a skunk could ever dream of."

Third card: Science, medicine

Q: And this became the incident with Easter, the young native?

A: Right. And more importantly, Greg became a great friend, and I was for the rest of the book forever e-mailing him and saying, "What bird should this be, what plant should this be, what insect will give you the most incredibly painful bite and necrose your flesh?" And he was like, "Oh, the bullet ant, no problem!" (laughs). So that's the other reason you go down and do these things.

Q: What other hands-on research did you do?

A: I sat in on a stranger's Caesarean section. I have a friend who's a surgeon, and he let me come and watch a Caesarean, which was much more upsetting than the trip to the Amazon, really. I am not squeamish. I am the most self-congratulatory not-squeamish person in the world, and I passed out at the very end, and I was out for like 10 minutes. I mean, I was totally, completely gone.

I got through the whole getting-the-baby-out. I was standing right next to my friend the surgeon, and he kept saying, "Here, touch that, that's the ovary!" But I had no idea it was so physical. What they used to pull the poor person on the table apart are these things that look like shoehorns. The doctor and the nurse each have a shoehorn that's bent backwards, and they are pulling this person open like a Thanksgiving turkey. And I would not have made this up. It was great to see it.

Q: Scientific ethics is an important theme. Has science been a long-term interest?

A: No, it's not, but I use research in my novels as a way to improve myself. I love putting things that I don't know anything about into my books as a reason to force myself to learn something.

What often happens is I'll do something in a small way in one book and have fun and think, "I want to do more of that." So in my last novel, "Run," there's a character who was studying ichthyology, which is the study of fish, and I started reading a lot of evolutionary biology. I started reading Darwin and those people and really got into it, for the first time in my life. I'd never studied science, so I thought, "Oh, in my next book I really want to write about science."

Fourth card: Literary stew

Q: You said some themes keep coming up in everything you write. What's an example?

A: The relationship between wealth and poverty, and disparate strangers thrown together to form a community, a family. It's very "Lord of the Flies." I get "Lord of the Flies" all the time in my reviews.

Q: Actually, with Marina journeying into the jungle to track down a renegade scientist, my first thought was "Heart of Darkness."

A: When I was about halfway through, I started to think, "Yeah, there's definitely some 'Heart of Darkness' or 'Apocalypse Now' in here," and a lot of it is almost a visual, the scenes of the river and all of that.

I have this theory that there are probably only really about five plots out there. One of them is, Character A goes missing, Character B is sent to find Character A, and that's what this is. There's the Orpheus myth, which is also in there, and actually, when I started the book, I was thinking about Henry James' "The Ambassadors," which is the same basic algebraic equation.

This book has all sorts of influences. The biggest are the Werner Herzog movies "Fitzcarraldo" and "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and his fantastic Amazon-jungle movies.

Q: It's all part of the cultural conversation. Speaking of which, is it true you're opening a bookstore in Nashville?

A: Yes, that's kind of the big news. I've been doing as many interviews about that as I've been doing for the book.

There's not a bookstore in Nashville except for used bookstores right now. I had thought a lot about opening a bookstore, looked into it, realized I had no clue what I was doing, and then recently met a woman named Karen Hayes who was planning on opening a bookstore. So I'm backing her, and I say she's the brains and the brawn and I'm the money and the flash.

Everyone is interested in Ann Patchett opening a bookstore, and that's great. It's going to really help us get this store up and going. Am I going to be behind cash registers and ordering books and hiring staff? No, I am not. I will do seasonal gift wrap.

Fifth card: Aussies wild

Q: So what are you reading right now?

A: I'm reading this book called "The Fatal Shore," by Robert Hughes, which I would put right between "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and "Blood Meridian" for the most brutal bloodbath of a book I have ever read. It's about the founding of Australia, and I'm going to Australia on book tour in the fall, and I don't know anything about Australia. I've always heard this is a brilliant book, and it is, it's fantastically well-written, but to say it's a downer (laughs) would not begin to cover it.

Q: Does this mean your next book is set in Australia?

A: No, but it means my book has Australians in it. You know, the Bovenders are Australian, and apparently, when you have an Australian in a novel, they really want you to go to Australia.

Q: The Bovenders are more great characters in the novel. Were you trying to represent an entire nationality in those two globe-trotting bohemians?

A: (Laughs) No, actually I was not. But, this is my great opportunity to name-drop on that. We have two of the most famous Australians in the world living in Nashville, Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman. I know Nicole a tiny bit, and so when I was working on the book, I called her up and I said, "You're the only Australian I have access to, and I need some good Australian surfer lingo." And she was terrific and gracious and came through for me and told me that they all wear boardies (a style of swimming trunks).

She had some good words for waves. I don't even remember now. But I put it all in the book.